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Overview

What is a phantasy? The word is spelled in a funny way, right? Instead of the word fantasy with an ‘f,’ (a word that indicates the presence of trolls, dragons or a fairy prince who lives under the Dursley’s stairs) phantasy with a ‘ph’ is a technical word.

This new music video from the Portland-based dream pop duo Mint Julep for their song “Aviary” is just mesmerizing. The directors play with the wigglegram or camera shift technique we see in a lot of gif animations, but give it a refreshingly different take by prolonging the effect across the span of a whole music video as well as running wigglegram against the regular film rate.

But writing can tend towards the deadpan. Which is one reason I like punctuation so much — it’s the emphatic and the gestural within language. Of course, punctuation is not the only means of emphasis and gesture. Word choice, rhythm, syntax: these are quite literally what make prose pop and move. Still, the keen use of punctuation can make the deadpan sing.

Music is a strange animal. There are the songs hit your spine like a lightning bolt, earthing themselves in your feet, forcing you to dance, laughing through the sweat at the simple joy of being moved by a beat until you collapse of exhaustion.

You experience a brief fugue: Picture one of the “eliminated” contestants returning home to their job as [something], meeting friends somewhere for a meal or coffee/tea beverage, picture them far away from a world that manicured them and plucked their brows, picture them exactly like you again, like… having had to go from being a Person on TV to being exactly like you except maybe a little more gorgeous, and that they have all these friends who were not chosen to go on TV.

If for a moment one can imagine Hamlet as a 14-year-old girl, born from the schaudenfreude of millennials, then perhaps one can understand the tragic story of Rebecca Black. It has been many Fridays since Ms. Black failed to upset the establishment and “got down.”

But Gaga has changed. In the few years since her debut she has morphed from this tough, sexed up, intellectual kitten to some sort of spiritual enlightenment devotee and a “rejects of society” savior. I remember when she first came out, she reminded me of the Paris Hilton party girl type except with actual brains and space-age sartorial ensembles.

For the final day of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, I ran about Union Park to try and catch most of the bands scheduled to perform. I treated it like a live sampler that record labels hand out, catching a couple songs here and there, only to dash off to another stage soon thereafter.

The musical acts that rose to the top of the pack on the second day of this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival all had one thing in common: Energy. Specifically, they knew how to wield it. Whether they brought it themselves, infused the crowd with it, or did some combination of the two, Saturday’s lineup had a nice slice of groups that kept the energy high: Chrissy Murderbot, No Age, OFF!, The Dismemberment Plan, and DJ Shadow.

It’s been seven years since I first heard of TV On The Radio, seven years since I got tickets to Last Call with Carson Daly—yes, that Carson Daly—just to see the band play, seven years since I fell for a group I never saw coming. They’ll be taking the stage Sunday night to close this year’s Pitchfork Music Festival, and I can’t help but think about watching the little art-rock-band-that-could grow into the arena-ready powerhouse they’ve become.